During the last few centuries women writers have considerably widened and deepened the areas of human experience with their sharp, feminine perception of life, successfully transmuted into verbal artifact. The world body of literature in English would have been much poorer today but for the contribution of women writers. The new series—Studies in Women Writers in English—is a grateful acknowledgment of that contribution and public recognition of their voice.
Nineteen essays included in this third volume of the series cover a wide spectrum of women writers across space and time. The women writers discussed in this volume include one from Britain—Virginia Woolf, the twentieth century stalwart of British novel, who has left her indelible mark on the art of fiction as well as on women writers and thinkers of the subsequent decades; four from America—Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich; two African-American talents—Toni Morrison, the Nobel Laureate for literature in 1993, and Alice Walker, the eminent Black American woman writer; and Margaret Clarke from Canada besides eight authors from India. The discussion on Indian writers include two articles on Sarojini Naidu, the illustrious icon of early Indian English poetry and ‘the Nightingale of India’; one on the charming nostalgic fiction of Shashi Deshpande who is compared to Margaret Clarke; one on the enigmatic Ruth Jhabvala; two on two different and equally well-known path-breaking novels by the young talent Githa Hariharan; and one on the celebrated recent autobiography of Indira Goswami. We also get a glimpse of Imtiaz Dharkar, Rama Mehta, and last but not least, Anita Desai, in addition to a bird’s eye view of the enormous harvest by Indian women novelists in the last two decades of the last century.
Since most of these authors are prescribed in the English syllabus in the universities of India, both the teachers and the students will find them extremely useful, and the general readers who are interested in literature in English and/or women writers will also find them intellectually stimulating.
Mohit K. Ray, a full Professor since 1982, is one of the seniormost Professors of English in the country. He has three books and a large number of research papers published in scholarly journals in India and abroad, which reflect his wide range of scholarship including Criticism, Comparative Literature, New Literature, Canonical Literature, Comparative Poetics and Translation Studies.
Professor Ray has attended and chaired sessions as an invited participant in many International Conferences, Seminars, and Colloquia held in different parts of the globe—England, France, Portugal, Austria, Finland, Estonia, America, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong etc.
Professor Ray has studied several languages including Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, French and German etc.
He has edited several anthologies of critical studies, and edits The Atlantic Critical Review, an international quarterly of global circulation.
Professor Ray is a distinguished member of many international bodies including Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, Paris, and Association Internationale des Critiques Littéraires, Paris.
Professor Ray is at present the Chief Editor of English Literature, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors.
